Chants Of Sennaar Interview: There Are No Plans For Additional Playable Content

Julien: My name is Julien Moya, and I’m the Co-Founder and Creative Director at Rundisc. For Chants of Sennaar, I was responsible for almost all the visual aspects of the game (art direction, modeling, animation), as well as writing and game design in collaboration with my partner Thomas Panuel, who also coded the game.

Julien: Of course, we hoped that players would like the game, but we honestly expected more polarized reviews. Knowing that we were making a niche game, we thought more players would say, “It’s nice, but it’s not my kind of game.” So we were surprised by the almost unanimous reception from the press and from all types of players.
But it didn’t allow us to expand the scope of the game or plan to add content. The experience we offer stands on its own, and we consider it complete as it is. We’ve said what we needed and wanted to say.

Julien: Of course, the relatively unexpected scale of the game’s success has lifted Rundisc into a whole new league. We now know that we have players ready to be interested in our next productions, and we’ve gained both competence and confidence in our development methods. And it’s significantly easier to attract potential partners when you have a proven track record of success. So, we didn’t take too long to get new projects underway!

Julien: Actually, we weren’t really inspired by the Myth of Babel. We started building this universe and writing a pretty complete scenario, and then we realized how similar it was to the biblical story, so we decided to lean on it a little bit for its evocative power. It was easier to tell people to “imagine a kind of Tower of Babel where this and that happens” than to try to explain the concept and the universe from scratch.

In fact, the initial inspirations for the game were to be found in numerous historical novels and movies, in the Franco-Belgian science fiction of the 70s and 80s (particularly the comic strips and cartoons of the Métal Hurlant era), and in the old European video games of the 85-88 period.

Julien: We didn’t create this niche, as some other puzzle games already used language in their gameplay, including Heaven’s Vault or Captain Blood, which both inspired us. But it’s a fairly small category, so it’s almost certain that we’ve expanded it in one way or another. Whether Chants of Sennaar will inspire other games in their gameplay, only time will tell. But we’d love to!

Julien: In terms of form, i.e., the visual aspect of the game’s languages, we took inspiration from writing systems that have existed throughout History, often mixing them. For example, the language of the Bards is a mixture of Kufic and Devanagari, which matches their culture.

The substance, i.e., the grammatical rules and the corpus of words used, was driven by the needs of the scenario and the gameplay. In Chants of Sennaar, languages, and their glyphs are actually puzzle elements, just like the doors, keys, and machines in the game. Conceptually, we made no difference. So, creating the languages was pure game design. We didn’t enlist the help of linguists, and our game has absolutely no scientific or historical pretensions.

Julien: No, that didn’t happen because, from the very beginning, we took great care to tailor this project and all its aspects to our team, our skills, and our resources. The artistic and graphical choices, the nature and scope of the game, the story, and the budget required to make it were defined and derisked as early as possible, even before we started production, to ensure that everything was within our grasp. So we have no regrets or frustrations about the final result: Chants of Sennaar is exactly the game we wanted to make.

One of the most common mistakes that small independent studios seem to make is to imagine games that are too big for them, games that require too many resources, and start developing them, assuming that they will somehow find money or a solution along the way to hire the people they need. It may work in some cases, but it’s a pretty reckless method, and in any case, it’s not our way of doing things.

Julien: Thomas would be in a much better position to answer about his process. But what I can say about our collaboration is that it was a real pleasure working with him. We were always careful to give Thomas the right amount of context and clues to guide him toward what we were looking for while completely trusting him to get it right. We chose to work with him because of his musical style and approach, so he was free to express himself throughout the project. I’d say that about 90% of the music he sent us during the course of the project was validated without almost any reservations or comments. And we’re obviously very pleased with the results.

Julien: It’s hard to say because every nomination is an honor in itself. It’s always a great moment to see our work being recognized by our peers and players. However, the 3 French Pégases Awards we won this year, including Best Game of the Year and Best Independent Game, were perhaps the most rewarding. The Pégases are probably not very well known internationally, as they reward only the best French productions. But for a studio like ours, and given the quality of the competition in our country, winning this award was a huge success.